Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Posts Tagged ‘prosecution’

A failed insider trading prosecution, and its costs

I’ve got a new post up at Cato at Liberty about the Second Circuit’s sharply worded dismissal of two insider trading convictions, which alas came too late to avoid massive damage to the enterprises and people concerned. Quoting NYT “DealBook”:

The dismissal of the case also raises questions about the November 2010 raids of Level Global and Diamondback Capital Management by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Soon after the raid on Level Global, the hedge fund, which was started by Mr. Chiasson and David Ganek, shut down, in part because of requests by investors to redeem their money after the raid. Mr. Ganek was never charged with any wrongdoing by federal authorities.

Diamondback, where Mr. Newman was a portfolio manager, continued to operate for another two years, but it decided to close its doors in December 2012 after receiving a wave of investor redemptions.

Mr. Ganek chided the government in a statement on Wednesday. “For the dozens of my high-integrity colleagues at Level Global who lost their jobs and their reputations because the F.B.I. improperly raided our firm in this now-discredited fishing expedition, today’s legal vindication is a reminder how prosecutorial recklessness has real impact on real people,” he said.

Raids, as opposed to subpoenas and other dull ways of obtaining information sought in an investigation, are irresistible to the press — and they greatly reinforce the public impression that there must have been serious wrongdoing at a target enterprise. That in turn can spell doom especially for financial undertakings, whose business will often be built on client and public trust. And if the case subsequently fails to stick by the evidence or the law, well, it’s on to the next prosecution, right?

More from Stephen Bainbridge and from Ira Stoll (more), who unlike many in the press gave skeptical attention to the case throughout its course.

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When unexplained deaths happen, borrow from the British?

The coroner’s inquest, familiar to readers of Agatha Christie, might be worth importing to the U.S. to look into police-caused deaths [Josh Voorhees, Slate, on ideas of Paul MacMahon]

Related: “The Grand Jury System Is Broken” [John Steele Gordon, Commentary, written post-Ferguson, pre-Garner]; New York Times “Room for Debate“; New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman asks for authority to take over prosecutorial authority in police shootings [WGRZ (auto-plays), New York Observer, Paul Cassell]; Harvey Silverglate via Todd Zywicki (don’t gut grand jury protections). And from Michael Bell, “What I Did After Police Killed My Son,” Politico: “In 129 years since police and fire commissions were created in the state of Wisconsin, we could not find a single ruling by a police department, an inquest or a police commission that a shooting was unjustified. …As a military pilot, I knew that if law professionals investigated police-related deaths like, say, the way that the National Transportation Safety Board investigated aviation mishaps, police-related deaths would be at an all time low.” (& Wisconsin aftermath)

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Prosecution roundup

  • If you like civil forfeiture, you’ll love AG nominee Loretta Lynch [Rare Liberty]
  • NYT “Room for Debate” tackles deferred prosecution agreements with contributions by James Copland, Lawrence Cunningham, others;
  • Book by Ross Cheit seeks to rehabilitate mass-child-abuse prosecutions of 1990s, Cathy Young not convinced [Reason] “When miscarriages of justice occur, prosecutors must answer for actions” [Boston Globe on Bernard Baran case, earlier here and here]
  • As Sierra Pacific case implodes, federal judge raises prospect that U.S. DoJ may have defrauded judges [Paul Mirengoff, earlier]
  • Video of panel on shaken baby syndrome doubts, relating to new film “The Syndrome” [Univ. of Missouri, K.C. School of Law, related earlier]
  • Ambiguous statutes in a regulated environment: time for a limit on the criminalization of business? [Matt Kaiser, Above the Law]
  • Las Vegas: federal judge calls “super seal” clandestine-forfeiture effort by U.S. prosecutors “constitutionally abhorrent” [Balko]

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Ferguson decision, cont’d

PBS NewsHour “read and analyzed more than 500 pages of witness testimony and compared each statement to those given by [officer Darren] Wilson,” pulling together the results in this chart, which illuminates points where the witness testimony tended to help Wilson’s defense and where it did not; perhaps most surprising is how many questions he was apparently not asked. Prosecutor Robert McCullough managed the grand jury proceedings almost in the manner of a defense lawyer for the man facing charges, a strategy extremely unlikely to be repeated in the great majority of grand jury proceedings where the accused is not a police officer [Jacob Sullum] And Conor Friedersdorf notes that if you were looking for poster cases of wrongful use of lethal force for which police were not held accountable — even when there was video or other strong documentary evidence — many other cases would stand higher on the list than that of Michael Brown.

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Police and community roundup

  • “As Ferguson waits, some lessons from the Rodney King riots” [Radley Balko] “ACLU wins federal court orders on right to video police in Ferguson, elsewhere” [St. Louis Post-Dispatch]
  • “What charges could the Michael Brown grand jury consider, if they choose to indict?” [Paul Cassell, Volokh; related on Missouri jury instructions regarding deadly force by police, Robert VerBruggen/Real Clear Policy]
  • Quick links: things this site has published on Ferguson, on police militarization, on police issues generally;
  • Interview with University of Illinois lawprof Andrew Leipold on grand jury process [U of I] A reminder about the surprisingly high error rates of eyewitness testimony [Balko]
  • “Judges propose wide reform of St. Louis County’s municipal courts” [StL; related, holiday warrant forgiveness] Municipal court fines and fees: “Why we need to fix St. Louis County” [Radley Balko, related (Better Together report), earlier here, here from Balko, etc.]
  • “The hurdles for indicting or convicting a uniformed officer are high, for many reasons.” Survey of police deadly force issue [L.A. Times] Police forces have strayed far from the “Peel Principles” for which London police were so admired [Tuccille, Reason]
  • Not much. “Whatever Happened To The White House Police Militarization Review?” [Evan McMorris-Santoro, BuzzFeed]

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“Prosecutors Who Rent Out their Letterhead to Debt Collectors”

The American Bar Association’s Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility moves against a dubious practice. “The demand letters are effective at scaring consumers because they are sent on prosecutor letterhead and contain threats of criminal prosecution — threats that no other debt collector could make.” However, they mobilize the prosecutor’s apparent public authority on behalf of legal threats which typically the prosecutor has not reviewed individually exercising professional judgment, and they can deceive debtors about the legal status of their claimed obligation. [Deepak Gupta, Consumer Law & Policy; earlier]

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Police and prosecution roundup

  • New Cato paper finds little evidence that pot legalization in Colorado has much affected rates of use, traffic safety, violent crime, ER visits, health, education outcomes [Jeffrey Miron working paper via Jacob Sullum]
  • Ferguson narrative changes as new evidence supports officer’s story on Michael Brown confrontation [Washington Post, Marc Ambinder/The Week, New Republic]
  • Why Obama was smart to choose Loretta Lynch as AG rather than knocking Republicans’ cap off with a pick like Thomas Perez [Cato; Todd Gaziano on confirmation questions]
  • Plea bargaining system: “Why Innocent People Plead Guilty” [Judge Jed Rakoff, New York Review of Books]
  • “There’s not much to do about catcalling, unless you’re willing to see a lot more minority men hassled by the police” [Kay Hymowitz, Time] Peer pressure seems to be a factor in restraining it [Andrew Sullivan] The “practice of catcalling is most taboo among members of the upper classes.” [Conor Friedersdorf, The Atlantic, earlier]
  • San Diego says it retains discretion over when to release cop camera footage [Radley Balko] How body cameras can vindicate cops [same]
  • Elderly Wisconsin man “was never considered dangerous, [but] was known to be argumentative,” so send in the armored vehicle [Kevin Underhill, Lowering the Bar, related] “The [SWAT-raided] Tibetan monks were here on a peace mission, for Christ’s sake. Well, not for Christ’s sake, but you know what I mean.” [same] Sen. Coburn quotes Madison: standing military force with overgrown executive will not long be safe companion to liberty [WSJ]

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“Codifying the Rule of Lenity”

Justice Scalia on the rule of lenity in U.S. v. Santos, 2008:

This venerable rule not only vindicates the fundamental principle that no citizen should be held accountable for a violation of a statute whose commands are uncertain, or subjected to punishment that is not clearly prescribed. It also places the weight of inertia upon the party that can best induce Congress to speak more clearly and keeps courts from making criminal law in Congress’s stead.

Vikrant Reddy (footnotes omitted):

Although this understanding should be perfectly ordinary, the application of the rule of lenity has in fact begun to erode dramatically in recent years. This has happened in concert with a troubling phenomenon: the dramatic growth of criminal law in a variety of non-traditional arenas, generally involving freely agreed-upon exchanges between adults. These “business crimes” (which include such things as harvesting oysters at the wrong time of day, improperly thrashing pecan trees, or even mislabeling citrus fruit) are increasingly exempt from the ordinary application of the rule of lenity in the minds of many judges and prosecutors.

Tim Lynch of the Cato Institute has even argued that the ordinary application of the rule of lenity “has been turned on its head.” He has observed that “When an ordinary criminal statute is ambiguous, the courts give the benefit of the doubt to the accused, but when a regulatory provision is ambiguous, the benefit of the doubt is given to the prosecutor.”11 What is troubling is that while defendants found guilty of these business crimes are subject to criminal sanctions—including prison—they increasingly do not enjoy the fundamental due process protections that are supposed to be guaranteed by the rule of lenity.

His paper for the Texas Public Policy Foundation recommends:

• Texas should formally codify the rule of lenity in the state code.
• The rule of lenity is a partial solution to a larger problem — the overall trend towards overcriminalization in American life.
• Fewer “business crimes” would mean fewer crimes for whichthe rule of lenity is disregarded.

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Police and prosecution roundup

  • Six L.A. County sheriff workers get prison for obstructing jail probe [L.A. Times, earlier]
  • More thoughts on pros and cons of police cameras [Howard Wasserman/Prawfs, Scott Greenfield]
  • Equal time: Heather Mac Donald’s perspective on Ferguson, policing, and race food for thought even if different from ours [City Journal; our earlier coverage of Ferguson]
  • “15-year mandatory minimum federal sentence for possessing shotgun shells (no shotgun) almost 20 years after past felonies” [Volokh]
  • How much criminal culpability for battered women when their violent partners harm children? [BuzzFeed]
  • If Stephen Colbert broke NYC’s wacky knife law on the air, all the more reason to reform it [Village Voice (link fixed now), earlier]
  • Details of additional charges in billion-dollar Department of Justice case against FedEx for not policing contents of its packages [WSJ, earlier]

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Police and prosecution roundup

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